


the wound of

by quensty



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angel Wings, Human Castiel in the Men of Letters Bunker (Supernatural), Hurt/Comfort, Injury, M/M, Mutual Pining, Newly Human Castiel (Supernatural), Season/Series 09, Unresolved Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-12 15:12:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29137623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quensty/pseuds/quensty
Summary: Castiel hasn’t told them about his wings.Sam and Dean know Metatron cut out his grace, but they don’t know that he took more from Castiel than just his powers. They don't know about the red, puckered skin that peeks over his shoulder like unruly feathers. About the burns that stretch across the entire expanse of his back, crooked and overlapping. The impression of six wings scorched onto his skin.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 14
Kudos: 170





	the wound of

**Author's Note:**

> this is a season nine au where dean _doesn't_ kick cas out of the bunker (saying this she casually throws aside a large rock).

The night air is a relief against Castiel’s flushed face.

The sun has finally set past the flat horizon, leaving the sky as dark and purple as a bruise. He lingers outside the closed, reinforced door of the bunker, letting the rush of wind whip past his unzipped sweater, then bites back his disappointment when all he feels is cold.

He sits down, his back not-quite touching the still-damp brick wall behind him. The gravel under his hands is shiny from the storm that afternoon. He can smell the fresh, musky notes of soggy earth, but they’re blurry and near imperceptible by now. It strikes him as strange until he remembers he can’t smell that well anymore.

The door opens and closes again. Artificial light cuts a sharp line up the sleek polish of the Impala before plunging Castiel back into darkness.

“Is this where the serious drinking happens?”

Something heavy plops down beside him. Dean sighs and extends his legs so his scuffed boots nudge Castiel’s own. In Dean’s hands is a bottle of beer. Or what’s left of it; the last dregs slosh around at the bottom. Castiel’s own sits near his thigh, forgotten.

“It was very warm inside,” Castiel explains.

“Yeah, that’s the quarter bottle you choked down, buddy.” Dean grins. “Lightweight.”

“I’ve tried alcohol before,” Castiel says. “This tasted … different.”

Dean groans. “You and Sam are so annoying. Thank fuck he’s not listening to this now. He acts like we weren’t raised on cheap Bud.”

“How is Sam?” It’s the first day in weeks that Sam has managed to get out of bed, so Dean decided a celebration was in order. Sam, still green at the edges and easily drained, had fallen asleep on the couch hours ago. He must still be there, snoring while the buzz of a sci-fi movie marathon plays on the TV.

Dean picks at the label of his beer. It tears away easily. “You saw him.”

“He seems to be improving. I was afraid he wouldn’t.”

“Yeah, he’s walking and talking and everything,” he says. “Yahtzee.”

“Dean—”

Dean waves him off. “I get it, Cas. Whatever. He’s getting better. It’s just hard to not look it in the mouth.”

They say nothing for a long time. Castiel spends it staring up at the sky, the few stars that wink in and out of sight. The cadence of Dean’s breathing lulls him into something adjacent to sleep. Awake, but balancing on the precipice.

Then Dean asks, “How about you?”

He blinks. “What about me?”

“How’re you doing?”

Castiel shrugs, which turns out to be a bad decision. It makes an aching, sharp pain spike between his shoulder blades. He grits his teeth and rides it out for five, six, seven seconds. Then he says, “I’m fine.”

“Uh-huh,” Dean says. He’s wearing an expression Castiel knows well: skeptical, concerned. “You got a car you wanna sell me, too?”

There are several ways to answer. On one hand, Castiel could play dumb and pretend he doesn’t know what Dean means, though that excuse becomes less believable with each passing day. On the other, Castiel could tell the truth, but the truth has always been subjective when it comes to the Winchesters.

Compromising, he admits, “I’m still sore, you could say. What happened—it was taxing.” It’s not a lie. The Fall did hurt Castiel’s vessel, and he imagines it will take a while longer for him to completely heal.

Thankfully, Dean seems to accept this, but still says, “How about we head back inside, huh? You look beat.”

Castiel shakes his head. “I’m not tired.”

“Yeah, well. I am, and if I leave, you’ll lock yourself out again.” Dean gets to his feet and extends a hand for Castiel to take. “Come on.”

***

Castiel hasn’t told them about his wings.

Sam and Dean know Metatron cut out his grace, but they don’t know that he took more from Castiel than just his powers. They don’t know that Castiel shoplifted from a pharmacy in Washington before they found him, stuffing packets of gauze and antibacterial ointment in his pockets while the cashier busied herself with a customer.

Most mornings, he’s the first to slink out of bed, already awake and feeling half-mad by all the hours of restless quiet. It’s clockwork: He flicks on the yellow light, sets his duffel bag on the sink, tugs his shirt over his head, and peels the dried gauze off his back strip by strip. And every morning, he’d rather suck on shards of glass than go through with it.

As expected, this night is no different. After Dean escorts Castiel back inside, Castiel doesn’t sleep. He lays under the covers, letting the thick silence press in on him from all sides until his alarm clock reads three in the morning and he crawls out of bed.

This time, though, Castiel is sloppy.

He forgets to lock the bathroom door behind him, so when the door creaks open, Castiel’s attention jumps from where he’d been staring down the sink drain to his reflection in the mirror—pale and twisted with pain—and then to the face just beyond it.

Dean freezes where he stands, all traces of sleep gone. His eyes are glued to Castiel’s exposed back.

Castiel has only managed to catch glances of it from the mirror, not ever the entire thing, but some of the red, puckered skin peek over his shoulder like unruly feathers. He knows that the burns stretch across the entire expanse of his back, crooked and overlapping. The impression of six wings scorched onto skin.

Finally, Dean breaks. “What the hell.”

Castiel stares back down the drain, where everything goes black and void. “I’m fine, Dean.”

Dean doesn’t deign that with a response. He hovers there for a moment, body strung tight as a bow, before he steps around where Castiel is still gripping the counter and starts digging through the drawers, focused and uncharacteristically quiet. He straightens from his crouch and sets the first aid kit in his hands on the counter. He clicks it open, revealing assorted bandages and half-empty bottles. Irritation prickles at Castiel.

“Dean,” Castiel insists, “I’m—”

“If you say you’re fine,” Dean snaps, “I swear to God, I’ll kick your ass.”

The next minute stretches strenuously between them. Castiel huffs. It isn’t worth the fight. He gazes fixedly into the middle-distance, ignoring Dean as best as he can.

“What are you waiting for?” Dean asks, making a vague gesture toward Castiel’s chest. Or, more accurately, where Castiel is clutching the unrolled bunch of gauze he used to wrap the burns. Half of it is still covering Castiel’s lower back.

Castiel considers not answering, but finally grits out, “I—some of it is … stuck. It hurts.”

“The fuck? Stuck?” Dean stares at him. “You wrapped it dry?”

Castiel frowns. “What do you mean ‘dry?’”

“God,” he says. “Fuck. Okay, give me that.”

He takes the half-bunch of gauze from Castiel. His fingers are gentle as he does it, and that’s how Castiel knows something is wrong. Dean is rarely gentle. “We gotta peel it off and replace it with a wet one. And clean these wounds before they get infected.”

His tone leaves no room for argument. When Castiel says nothing, Dean makes eye contact, raising an eyebrow. “You listening?”

“Yes.”

“It ain’t gonna be fun.”

“I know that.”

“And, what? You’re just gonna let me? No bitchy remarks?”

Castiel has seen Dean play nurse before. Mostly in his memories: learning to stitch up his father with liquor and tooth floss, splinting Sam’s arm with his own shoelaces and a rolled-up newspaper until they made it to a hospital. Sporadically, when he was still an angel. He trusts Dean to do this, and he—this vessel is weaker now. Castiel is weaker.

“What other alternative is there,” Castiel mutters, and lets Dean get to work.

***

After, Dean strolls out of the bathroom without giving Castiel or his shaky arms a backwards glance. He assumes Dean is heading back to bed, but then he comes back and tosses Castiel his overcoat. “Come on. We’re going for a drive.”

“What?” he asks, but Dean is already gone.

They buckle into the Impala in silence, and spend most of the drive that way, too. Dean puts on one of his mixtapes and keeps the volume at a low hum. They drive miles and miles, past flat cornfields and open pastures and the edges of small neighborhoods. There aren’t many other cars out on the country roads. The world is still, but the quiet doesn’t chafe.

Dean finally pulls over in the middle of nowhere. Trees, shrubs, darkness, and not much else surrounds them.

He rolls down his window, letting in a brisk gust of wind. Then he reaches over and does the same to Castiel’s. He radiates warmth where his arm accidentally brushes against Castiel’s chest. When he pulls back, a hollowness echoes inside Castiel where he’s cracked and incomplete. He ignores this in favor of watching Dean settle back into his seat, turn off the ignition, and refuse to speak.

Time passes. The headlights catch on the asphalt, and overhead, the old, sodium-white street lights flicker. Blowing wind rustles the dry leaves of a few nearby trees. The sound reminds Castiel of feathers.

Eventually, the headlights click off, and they sink into twilight.

“Dean,” he asks, “what are we doing here?”

He can hardly discern Dean’s profile, but the whisper of fabric against leather tells him Dean is shrugging. “You haven’t been sleeping.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Used to do this when Sam had nightmares,” he says. “We would take a drive, and he’d clock out faster than if I’d given him a Vicodin.”

Another pause. “Dean—“

“Just be quiet for a second.”

“We’ve been quiet for hours.”

“That’s because I’m still pissed at you.”

He tries again. “Dean—”

“Stop it,” Dean snaps. “You just don’t get it, do you? You can’t keep things like this from us. You can’t just lie about being okay.”

“I didn’t lie,” Castiel says tightly. “My injuries are not life-threatening, and you and Sam have suffered far worse. My vessel—”

“It’s not a vessel anymore, Cas,” he cracks in. “It’s _you_. You’re human. You can’t just shrug shit off like this anymore.”

“I know that.”

“Do you?”

“Yes,” he grinds out.

Castiel doesn’t have the words to explain to Dean why being human feels so wrong. He doesn’t know how to explain that Castiel was not made for this. As an angel, there was always noise, whether it was the whispered prayers of humans scattered across the globe or a rerun of a soap opera buzzing from a woman’s TV in Omaha. Castiel was not meant to be slumming it in midwestern America, to be standing in firing ranges and missing every shot, to sit in the quiet and expect to be soothed into a peaceful dream. He feels trapped, too big, and like any second he’ll run out of air. So he ends up awake all night and tired throughout the day, drowsing in the library where he can listen to Dean laugh as he watches a movie on his laptop. 

(He doesn’t know how to explain that sometimes he makes the mistake of watching Dean too closely on the ride back from hunts. That he’ll stare as the passing headlights briefly illuminate Dean’s face until he’s consumed by _beautiful_ and _Dean Winchester_ and _still so—)_

Dean watches Castiel like he can see a glimpse of what he’s thinking on his face, but Castiel says it anyway. “I didn’t want to give you further reason to rethink my stay.”

Dean sighs, scrubbing a hand over his face. “For fuck’s sake. I wouldn’t send you packing for something like this.”

“If I’m no use to you, Dean, then why wouldn’t you?”

“Does Sam look like he’s much use to me right now?” he asks, and when Castiel opens his mouth to interrupt, adds quickly, “No. You’re our best friend, Cas. You’re family. I wouldn’t do that.”

There are still traces of anger in his voice, but they’re outweighed by the gentleness in Dean’s eyes, the incremental softening of his jaw. Castiel misses when he could turn Dean’s rosy-gold soul between his hands and know what he was feeling because Dean’s expression right now is like—Castiel doesn’t know. His memory flutters. In fact, he’s never seen Dean look at anyone like this before. It pins Castiel in place.

“You always surprise me,” Castiel says. “You’re kind when I least expect it.” 

Dean blinks, caught off-guard. He rubs the back of his neck, embarrassment coloring his cheeks. “Heh.” The radio is still playing, Castiel realizes distantly. Dean’s thumb raps against the wheel along with the beat. _Bum, bum, bum_. Castiel feels it in his chest. “Well,” he says, “you know me.”

“Yes,” Castiel says. “I do.”

Dean breathes. He breaks eye-contact, eyes slipping to where Castiel’s hands are folded together in his lap. Then—too quick like he couldn’t help it—to Castiel’s mouth. It runs Castiel through.

“All right, Romeo,” Dean says. “I—how about that drive? I bet you haven’t slept at all.” This idea spurs Dean into sudden action: he puts his foot back on the pedals, starting the ignition so the Impala rumbles back to life. This time, he doesn’t reach across Castiel. Doesn’t risk touching him, which Castiel is simultaneously thankful for and disappointed by. In his mind, he thinks, _more,_ and doesn’t know what he means. “Just sit back, man. Believe me. You’ll crash before you can say, ‘one sheep.’”

Dean pulls away from the curb. The horizon is brightening. The sun will be rising soon, but for now, Castiel is captivated by the way the light snags on Dean’s eyelashes. He pillows his head on the seat and allows himself this one small indulgence. “Thank you,” he says.

“Sure.” He glances at Castiel, tapping his thumb again in quick staccato. _Bum, bum, bum._ “Don’t mention it.” 

**Author's Note:**

> i've never fallen from god's favor and had my celestial wings burned onto my back so sorry if any of this is inaccurate. 
> 
> feel free to rb the fic [here](https://quensty.tumblr.com/post/641949472356728832/fic-the-wound-of-supernatural-castieldean) and/or follow me @[cleromancer](https://cleromancer.tumblr.com/) for some truly awful content ❤️


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